Latin 510 (Tacitus). Assignment for Week 5 (T 11/3 and Th. 11/5)

Germania 1-15

NB: Thursday’s class will be cut short for Jeff Hurwit’s talk at 3:30 PM.

Translation exercise (to be handed in Tuesday): Translate into good, idiomatic English Ger. 3. And: choose any three words to look up in the OLD; underline these words in your translations, and in parentheses indicate which level in the OLD entry you found the best translation – if the passage you’re translating is cited in the definition in the entry, indicate that (e.g., ‘OLD 5a’ or ‘OLD 3b, citing this passage’). Please resist the temptation to read Rives’ translation (or any other)!

On Tuesday we’ll concentrate on (and translate much of) the beginning chapters, probably 1-6; and on Thursday, the rest (or as much as we have time for).

A comment on commentaries: As you may have surmised, and as I mentioned on Thursday, the commentary situation for the Germania is rather different than for the Agricola or now, with the publication of Mayer, for the Dialogus. As was true of O/R’s commentary on Agricola, you’ll need to consult Rives regularly in order to make sense of the text.

Rives is not, however, on the order of Ogilvie and Richmond. In that category, of the commentaries in English and in the library, Furneaux's is the best available: I’ve placed the seminar room copy of this on our reserve shelf alongside Rives (Anderson's is perhaps better, but not available). Of those in German, Much's is still very good indeed, but Lund's 1988 commentary is the one you should use if you want to use a German commentary (it contains in addition to the commentary the Latin text with facing German translation). Lund's commentary has two advantages over the rest: he pays attention to all aspects of the Germania (literary, philological, archaeological, etc.) and is far more up-to-date than Much (and all other commentators, for that matter) on relevant archaeological evidence. If you read German, I encourage you to consult it. Between Rives, Lund, and the ANRW volume cited on your bib., you could assemble a pretty respectable bib. on the Germania.

Ponderanda

Beginnings, again: what differentiates the beginning of the Germania from that of the Agricola? What is the purpose of the former (and how do you know)?

Think in terms of a comparison between this work and the Agricola, between the Britons and the Germans. Is there any sense in which a reading of the Germania alters or influences your reading of the Agricola (yet)? What specific points of comparison can you identify between the ethnographies of the two works?

Secondary reading

Rives’ Introduction, pp. 1-74

Optional: Furneaux pp. 4-33

To get a good sense of the range of current scholarship on the Germania, you might have a look at the table of contents of Beiträge zum Verständis der Germania des Tacitus, H. Jankuhn and D. Timpe, edd. 2 vols. (Göttingen 1989).